There was supposed to be a get-out-the-vote event Thursday night at Union Temple in Prospect Heights but it was canceled after someone used a marker to scrawl anti-Semitic messages throughout the building including the message “Kill all Jews.” The story was all over local media in New York last night and Twitter even apologized after “Kill all Jews” became a trending topic on the site. From WABC-TV:

Graffiti inside the Union Temple on Eastern Parkway in Prospect Heights read “Kill all Jews” and “Hitler,” along with some other horribly offensive language.

Police say some of it was written in black marker inside a stairwell, and the vandalism forced the cancellation of a political event because people felt threatened.

A “Get out the Vote” event hosted by Broad City actress liana Glazer was canceled as a result.

“What was scary was that it was all over the building, and then the cops were kind of searching the building,” Glazer said. “It was too freaky. It was too freaky to hold it.”

The incident made national news this morning at USA Today and other sites, including Buzzfeed. Glazer told Buzzfeed, “The Generator community experienced, together, how white supremacy, anti-Semitism and racism silences human rights politics and halts progress.” She didn’t quite say it, but I think her expectation was that the person responsible would be another white nationalist, possibly someone inspired by the Pittsburgh shooter.

Friday afternoon the NYPD released this statement on Twitter along with a photo of the suspect:

Our Hate Crime Task Force is seeking to identify this individual. On 11/01 at approx. 6:00 pm, after having entered the Union Temple located at 17 Eastern Parkway, he is seen on video writing Anti-Semitic graffiti on the walls on multiple floors. ☎️ #800577TIPS#CrownHeightspic.twitter.com/KI25QkiQBw

Obviously, the race of the suspect doesn’t make this any less threatening. There’s no evidence this was any kind of “false flag” attack. Those ugly messages probably represent the suspect’s true feelings about people with a different background. But there’s no denying that this outcome probably doesn’t fit the left’s preferred narrative about who commits these crimes.

Yesterday I wrote about a story at the NY Times which pointed out that anti-Semitic incidents accounted for about half of the hate crimes in New York. However, the article also notied that the suspects in those cases rarely fit the image most people probably have of who would commit such acts:

If anti-Semitism bypasses consideration as a serious problem in New York, it is to some extent because it refuses to conform to an easy narrative with a single ideological enemy. During the past 22 months, not one person caught or identified as the aggressor in an anti-Semitic hate crime has been associated with a far right-wing group, Mark Molinari, commanding officer of the police department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, told me.

“I almost wish it was sometimes more clear cut,’’ he said. “It’s every identity targeting every identity.”

The NYPD has video of the suspect but we’ll have to wait and see what he says when arrested to get the full picture of what motivated this.